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Tech News
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national and former OpenAI worker, entered a not guilty plea Friday in San Francisco federal court to a charge of intercepting oral communications. He was indicted by a grand jury on Oct. 27 and remains jailed without bail since his October arrest, and was returned to custody after the hearing.
Voting concluded Tuesday in the 2026 midterms after record early turnout, with few reported problems despite a year of disputes over election administration. Trump's Justice and Homeland Security departments conducted operations targeting noncitizen voters, including arrests in California, and DOJ deployed a large poll-monitoring effort while also suing to block certification of Alaska's results if Democrats won the Senate race there. The administration said no armed federal officers would be stationed at polling places, though officials and Democratic groups had prepared for possible federal intervention.
The Justice Department under Attorney General Todd Blanche has sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning of potential criminal prosecution if they fail to preserve election records for 22 days. This follows a year of DOJ actions including demands for unredacted voter rolls, executive orders asserting federal control over elections, raids on election offices, and claims of widespread noncitizen voting that bipartisan investigations have found to be rare. A federal judge recently criticized the administration for making similar prosecution threats in another case.
Reuters reports the Department of Justice has asked about how Nvidia's roughly $13 billion purchase of Hugging Face, agreed in September, could affect competitors in the AI market. Hugging Face runs an open-source platform for hosting and testing AI models and also sells AI infrastructure, which appears to be the focus of the DOJ's inquiry.
The Department of Justice disrupted operations tied to Famous Chollima, a North Korean threat group, arresting two suspects and charging 14 individuals. The FBI's 'Lonestar Roundup' operation searched 40 Texas residences between September 21-25, seizing about 187 laptops and KVM devices used to run so-called laptop farms that let North Korean IT workers appear to be based in the US.
The FBI arrested OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, on October 9 after a covert recording device was discovered in the company's executive conference room. OpenAI said the device had been planted days earlier and the employee was fired; the DOJ says surveillance footage placed him near and inside the room beforehand, and a bag found nearby contained his ID and a second similar device.
The Financial Times reported that the US Department of Justice has seized millions of dollars in bank accounts and crypto wallets connected to Tether Limited, issuer of the Tether stablecoin. The seizures stem from an FBI investigation into Capstone, an unlicensed payment processor accused of running an elder-fraud scheme that funneled illicit funds into crypto, with the money reportedly moving through offshore bank EQIBank, which serviced both Tether and Bitfinex.
Karen Serobovich Vardanyan, 35, was sentenced to 24 months in prison and three years of supervised release for breaching U.S. corporate networks and deploying Ryuk ransomware between March 2019 and June 2020. He pleaded guilty in July after being extradited from Kyiv following an April 2025 arrest, with prosecutors saying he and co-conspirators collected roughly 1,610 bitcoins in ransom payments, worth over $15 million at the time, from victims including a Michigan company, a Texas school and an Oregon technology firm.
On The Verge's Decoder podcast, former DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter discussed AI companies' requests for antitrust exemptions to jointly coordinate on safety, amid growing alarm from researchers at Anthropic and Google DeepMind who have quit citing unheeded safety risks. Kanter, who led major antitrust actions against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster under Biden, weighed in on whether such exemptions represent legitimate safety collaboration or a bid for regulatory capture and cartel-like behavior.
Gregg Phillips, an election-fraud conspiracy theorist previously ousted from leading FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, confirmed he is still employed by the Trump administration on administrative leave. He was recently seen visiting the Department of Justice with outgoing pardon attorney Ed Martin, though the nature of his current duties remains unclear.